‘Oppenheimer’ Producer Emma Thomas on Making the Historical Epic a Summer Blockbuster: “That’s the Genius of Chris Nolan”

Emma Thomas has been producing Christopher Nolan’s films since Nolan’s 1997 short feature Doodlebug. 30 years and 12 feature films later, she most recently served as the producer on Oppenheimer, a historical epic about nuclear physicist and father of the atomic bomb J. Robert Oppenheimer, now nominated for 13 Academy Awards including best picture.

“What’s so fascinating about the story of Oppenheimer for me and the development of the bomb is, it’s this story that has universal worldwide implications, but ultimately, it’s also a very personal story of one man and how he both wrangles the project into being but also grapples with the implications of what he and his group of scientists have done,” Thomas, who is also married to Nolan, tells THR. “It’s got the micro and the macro ethic. It’s a personal story that has implications for us all.”

Thomas talks to THR about how the idea of Oppenheimer came about, why the marketing of the film seemed daunting to her and why the production of the film reminded her of their work on Nolan’s 2017 Dunkirk.

Let’s take it back to the beginning. Tenet had just come out … at what point did the conversations around Oppenheimer start and what were the details?

We knew we wanted to get back to work, but we weren’t sure what it was going to be. I think Chris had few notions and then just randomly, we went to stay the weekend with Chuck Roven and his wife at his ranch. And Chuck said, do you mind if I send you a couple of projects and one of them was the book American Prometheus. Chris has long been interested in the story of Oppenheimer and the development of the bomb. In fact, Rob Pattinson had actually given him a book of Oppenheimer’s speech at the end of Tenet, and as you know, Tenet actually makes mention of the development of the bomb and Oppenheimer, so it just seems like it was fate somehow. We both read the book and immediately Chris responded to the huge level of research that was in there, and I think immediately felt like there really was something in there that he could bring in synthesizing that story into a feature film. That was early ’21.

It’s crazy to think that his story hasn’t been made into a feature film until now.

It’s my understanding — we didn’t sort of do too much looking back — that there have been a few attempts to make this film based on American Prometheus. And I have to acknowledge that when I read the book, before Chris told me what his thinking was in terms of what he was going to extrapolate from it, just on the basis of pure reading of this incredibly dense, very weighty, very academic, fascinating, but somewhat dry book… I did wonder how on earth we could turn this into a sort of summer blockbuster, and that is the genius of Chris Nolan. He can read this story and come up with a way that he can turn it into a thrilling, edge of your seat movie that you know, even though it had to be three hours, feels like about an hour and a half just because there’s so much packed into it.

What were those conversations like with Chris?

We talked about what the parameters were going to have to be. He said, “look, it’s going to have to be three hours. There’s just no question.” When he wrote the script, Chuck had the rights to the book, but we hadn’t set it up anywhere. We hadn’t had any conversations with anybody. And Chris sort of did it on spec. He wrote the script in order to figure out if he could write the script, if that makes sense. And I think that the first moment where I really felt like he had a proper handle on it was when he came to me and said, I’ve figured out what the ending is. And from that point on, I could see that he had the wind in his sails. I was still a little nervous, as I said, it wasn’t until I read the first draft, and I really understood that he’d managed to take these congressional hearings and take the Oppenheimer story and create this just incredible, incredibly suspenseful story. That was the moment where I was like, “Okay, now I completely get it in a way that I just hadn’t before,” but that’s why he’s a great writer, and I’m not.

You both have talked about how you never expected this level of success for an R-rated, black and white, historical biography about a physicist. What were the early conversations like about that aspect of making the movie? How were you making sure it would resonate with different people?

The audience’s response to the film has been so far beyond what we ever hoped it would be. We genuinely could never have imagined that it would resonate in the way that it did. But I think that this is something that Chris has consistently done over the course of his career, as he makes films with the audience in mind and he has faith that the audience will respond. He doesn’t talk down to audiences, he doesn’t pander to audiences to make films that create an experience for audiences and that transport them beyond the four walls of the theater. Marketing played an enormous part in all of this, and I think that, frankly, at this point, people know what to expect with a Chris Nolan film: Whatever the film is, they know it’s going to be something different and it’s going to be a big experience. And I think that that certainly helped, but no, it certainly wasn’t a foregone conclusion.

Do you and Chris ever sit back and wonder how you got here?

All of the films honestly have built upon each other. For example, when you look at something like Inception, there’s no world in which we could have made that after Insomnia, or Memento. Each film builds on the last and yes, sometimes we do pinch ourselves and think, “gosh, how did we get here?” But I’m not going to interrogate that too much. It’s a very nice place to be.

You also have an incredible cast – can you talk a little about the casting process?

We actually got incredibly lucky with the casting process because I think we got pretty much everyone that we wanted. John Papsidera is absolutely the most genius casting director and I think he’s one of our oldest collaborators: We’ve been working with him since Memento. Honestly, the casting process on this film was actually the most fun of any other film because the script was so good. Chris would never say that, but it really was a great script. And I think that everyone that does come and play, you know, when they read the script, [they] raise their hands immediately. The nice thing was that because it’s such a huge cast, nobody was really having to be there for too long. Other than Cillian, who was there the whole time, there was a lot of in and out for people, which is lesser investment, I think, which is nice. Obviously the most exciting moment really was when Cillian said yes. We love Cillian so much. He’s absolutely a delight to work with and we both think he’s absolutely brilliant. There’s the thing I love about his work, is that it’s also invisible. It’s not showy or showboating. You watch those eyes and you know exactly what’s going on in that man’s head, which is incredible. The other big moment was when Robert Downey agreed to come and play Strauss. What we were both very excited about with that was this notion of taking a huge movie star who has a very well known persona and a fantastic track record, but really seeing him do something different that we haven’t seen him do before.

When you realized Chris wanted to use practical effects on this film, like he usually does, what were your thoughts, especially because you were making a movie about the atomic bomb?

Honestly, I knew we were going to be able to do it because we have amazing team: Scott Fisher, who is a special effects supervisor, and Andrew Jackson, who I knew was going to be doing visual effects. Andrew was the second person to read the script after me, they are [both] absolutely brilliant. I had absolutely no doubt. To me, it was so much easier to conceive over a giant fireball in the sky, and a truck flipping in the middle of Chicago or a city falling in on itself. I think, for me, the bigger issue was going to be more in the writing of the script itself, the wrangling of the crazy number of speaking parts and the cast that we wanted to get on board for this. And then also, the marketing of the film. We were working with a new studio and didn’t really know how all of that was going to go and the big challenge with this film was putting a film out about very weighty subjects in the middle of the summer and hoping that people were going to come to theaters. Once we got into it with [Chief Marketing Officer for Universal Pictures] Michael Moses, who is absolutely the most genius marketer, I felt better about that, but at the beginning, that really was much more of a concern than how we were going to achieve the practical effects.

You’ve been producing Chris’ movies since you both met at university. How was Oppenheimer different from your previous projects?

I’m going to say it’s different, but in the way we made it, it felt a lot more like Dunkirk than other films that we’ve made because we made it in a fairly scrappy way. Money was fairly tight — we had an enormous amount of money to make this film, but it was an incredibly ambitious film to make for that money. We went to Universal and said, “this is the film we want to want to make, we know it’s risky, but we’re going to make it for half of what anyone else would do.” And it was important to us to do it in that way, because we don’t want to lose money for people. And so the last time we’d really done a film like that was Dunkirk, which was similarly risky in that we made the film with not a huge number of recognizable names, or at least certainly when we pitched it to Warner Bros., we had told them that we we wanted it to be unknown [actors], and it was a challenging subject, particularly in the American marketplace. And I believe it was very profoundly experimental actually as some movies go and this felt in the same world: It was a very risky film in 2022 to be making a three hour historical… I call it an epic, although, in actual fact, when you look at the sum of its parts, it’s a lot of people talking and so it felt risky. Therefore, we felt we had to be responsible, and it meant that we had to make it in a very scrappy way just to get every dollar on the screen, we had to shoot in a very, very short schedule. Everybody had to sort of muck in to make that happen. And in some ways, although that was hard, and it was definitely a challenging production, and a relentless pace in the shoot, the energy was really inspiring. It was kind of freeing in some ways to throw away some of the trappings of big movie-making.

Looking at your guys’ IMDb page, you went from making movies every year-ish, then two years apart, and the last have been three years apart. To what do you attribute that change, and what do you think is the best time frame in your experience?

I haven’t analyzed this in detail, but if I had to guess, I would imagine that we were making films every two years when we were doing Batman, and I think that was about the fact that after Batman Begins, we knew that there was the likelihood of The Dark Night so we wanted to do another one first but Chris didn’t want to wait too long before doing a sequel to Batman Begins. And then the same thing with The Dark Knight Rises. And after The Dark Knight Rises, I think that we started slowing down because the films were no longer in a production line in that way. This is a very personal answer, but three years [is the best time frame] because for me, I like having the time to really ruminate between films… I think a film really isn’t done until it’s out in the world. And it’s hard. The way we make films is that every film we make, we believe is going to be the best film that’s ever been made. You can’t make films if you don’t go into it with that, and I think that that’s the reason why we’re fairly monogamous filmmakers, if that makes sense. We don’t work on multiple projects at the same time. We’re working on one thing at a time, so for me, having a film out every three years is the perfect way to go. Just because that allows you time to finish a film, regroup, really think about what you want to do next, what you want to devote yourself to and then do it properly. I’d be interested to know what Chris would answer. He would probably say every two years because he’s really not happy unless he’s working on a film.

You’ve been a female producer in a male-dominated industry for a long time. Are you seeing progress in terms of seeing female producers?

I think that there have always been female producers that have done great work. And I think that it’s actually one of the categories of jobs in our business where women have always done well. There are so many great women producers that have been around for a long time and I’m very glad that there seem to be more and more. The areas where I would love to see more women in the business are in the other [areas]… I mean, I am so happy with how many women were directing great movies this year. I think it takes time for these things to change, but I really feel like we’re making progress. We want things to be 50/50 immediately from the moment that we all made the realization that it needed to be, but I just think it takes time, but I do think we’re on our way. And we were thrilled that they were so many female department heads on Oppenheimer including Ruth De Jong for production design, Jennifer Lame for editing and Ellen Mirojnick for costume design.